Excerpted from the New York Times:
On the campaign trail on Monday, Mr. McCain, the Republican presidential nominee, struck a populist tone. Speaking in Florida, he said that the economy’s underlying fundamentals remained strong but were being threatened “because of the greed by some based in Wall Street and we have got to fix it.”
But his record on the issue, and the views of those he has always cited as his most influential advisers, suggest that he has never departed in any major way from his party’s embrace of deregulation and relying more on market forces than on the government to exert discipline.
While Mr. McCain has cited the need for additional oversight when it comes to specific situations, like the mortgage problems behind the current shocks on Wall Street, he has consistently characterized himself as fundamentally a deregulator and he has no history prior to the presidential campaign of advocating steps to tighten standards on investment firms.
He has often taken his lead on financial issues from two outspoken advocates of free market approaches, former Senator Phil Gramm and Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman. Individuals associated with Merrill Lynch, which sold itself to Bank of America in the market upheaval of the past weekend, have given his presidential campaign nearly $300,000, making them Mr. McCain’s largest contributor, collectively.
In early 1995, after Republicans had taken control of Congress, Mr. McCain promoted a moratorium on federal regulations of all kinds. He was quoted as saying that excessive regulations were “destroying the American family, the American dream” and voters “want these regulations stopped.” The moratorium measure was unsuccessful.
“I’m always for less regulation,” he told The Wall Street Journal last March, “but I am aware of the view that there is a need for government oversight” in situations like the subprime lending crisis, the problem that has cascaded through Wall Street this year. He concluded, “but I am fundamentally a deregulator.”
Later that month, he gave a speech on the housing crisis in which he called for less regulation, saying, “Our financial market approach should include encouraging increased capital in financial institutions by removing regulatory, accounting and tax impediments to raising capital.”
Other than Mr. Gramm, who as chairman of the Senate Banking Committee before his leaving Congress in 2002 worked to block efforts to tighten financial regulation, Mr. McCain’s closest adviser on matters of Wall Street is John Thain, the chief executive of Merrill Lynch, who has raised about $500,000 for Mr. McCain. Unlike Mr. Gramm, Mr. Thain has a reputation as a pragmatic, nonideological, moderate Republican. That the men are Mr. McCain’s touchstones is typical of his small and eclectic mix of advisers, making it hard to generalize about how Mr. McCain would act as president.
A prominent McCain supporter, Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota, signaled how Mr. McCain would try to make his antiregulation record fit the proregulation times that the next president will inherit. Mr. Pawlenty suggested in an interview on Fox News that, given the danger that “any future administration” would go too far, Mr. McCain would be the safer bet to protect against “excessive government intervention or excessive government regulation.”
The real Maverick?
Gotta go with the car...
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